James Cridland

Radiodays Asia in Jakarta

RCS and others speak at Radiodays

I was in Jakarta last week for Radiodays Asia (and Podcast Day Asia). There are plenty of stories about it at Radioinfo Asia; and you’ll find some more podcast-related chats in the Podnews Weekly Review this week, from about five minutes in. Radiodays Asia is always a fascinating glimpse into how other markets work: Asia is a very uneven set of markets, which makes it particularly challenging to program an event for everyone, but I learnt a lot, as ever.

It was interesting hearing from the BBC, who announced the name for a new podcast for Asia - “Asia Specific” will be the name, and it will come from Singapore. It’s been a year in planning so far, and it’s had a set of pilots; I must confess to being slightly surprised, when I interviewed Siobhán Leahy, to learn that they haven’t, yet, settled on a final release cadence: “I think we might launch with two episodes a week… one, building up to two, maybe building up to three.”

There are plenty of videos to watch of the event, too - I spoke with Jacqueline Bierhorst about DAB+, in a session hosted by World DAB; our friends at RCS hosted a discussion about moving radio to the cloud; and Chris (UK) Stevens from TM Studios talked about radio imaging. (And if you look hard enough in the YouTube links there, you’ll find both tracks of the entire conference).

RCS

Classifieds

  • Maths, Art or Magic? Radio scheduling and programming is easier when you know how to make it consistent and position it to succeed. Buy Robin Prior’s new book and discover clock-building, formatting, the forward-sell, music research, and much more.
  • Supercharge your radio show with world-class prep: the right show prep delivered to you on time, EVERY day, without fail. Grab a £1 week-long trial of Show Prep and stop chasing round looking for things to use on your show, running out of time before the show, and trying to sight-read the newspapers!

  • ‘The Strangest Radio Station Ever Appeared. It Plays One Thing Only!’ - a fun YouTube video highlighting a ghost service on a few DAB multiplexes in the UK. I love odd things like this, especially when they get coverage all by themselves. Speaking of which…

  • Paid content: Somerset House has launched The Dream Radio: a three-week, 24/7 stream to reimagine new and hopeful ways of being. It features contributions from Maxine Peake, Brian Eno, Yanis Varoufakis, and the Palestinian Sound Archive. All in collaboration with Turner Prize winning, Somerset House Studios artist Tai Shani. Listen at dreamradio.net until 15th September. (This looks a fascinating service, with original commissioned work in the evenings, archive content during the day, and even audiobooks overnight.)

  • Duncan Campbell, formerly of ARN, writes about the role of a Content Director in radio.

  • A fascinating trip down memory lane on Steve Bowbrick’s blog, with details from an event I apparently helped organise in 2008 about how the BBC should operate online. More from Martin Belam over here. The BBC of 2008 seems very different to the BBC of 2025.

  • Last week, I suggested that Apple’s radio stations have only been available to paying subscribers of Apple Music. Thank you to the varied people pointing out that I was wrong: they were available for free to everyone, but not syndicated to other platforms.

Who wants a beer? I’m in London next week, and if you’re around from 5.00pm to 7.00pm on Tuesday 16 Sep, it would be fun to catch up for a pint of “man in the box”. I’ll be at The Yorkshire Grey in Langham Street. I appreciate it’s the day before the Radio Festival - which, thanks to some bad scheduling of flights on my part I’m not going to - so, sorry. But that might mean you’re in London anyway, right? Anyway, if you’re able to pop by, it would be excellent to see you. I’ll be the jetlagged bloke in the corner.

Thank you to Jon in Vancouver (“Thanks for speaking out for us non-uk bbc radio listeners”); Chris Stevens (“Always enjoy the content and the links.”); and David Webb (“I enjoy your informative and interesting newsletter”) for your kind extra coffees. The dog is now very annoyed if we don’t go out for a coffee on time.

Where I am speaking next

Supporters

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Selected bits from Radioland are in RadioInfo in Australia, and RAIN News in the US
Lesen Sie außerdem ausgewählte Artikel auf Deutsch in Radioszene

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